Issue 51 Easter 2017 Issue 51 of Anor, Easter Term, 2017 Page 1 EDITORIAL Be merry and welcome! The sun is shining on the gardens as I write this editorial, late in the evening, and all things are bright and beautiful. Moreover, exams have ended. Believe it or not, this conjunction of events is not pathetic fallacy on the part of your editor; in a decidedly un-English manner, it actually appears to be true. This is not a very small issue, somewhat to your editor’s amazement, given the preoccupation of most of us with other matters. My thanks go out to all the lovely contributors who have given their time to make this issue what it is. Especial thanks go to the wonderful and talented Louise Vincent, who is responsible for the pretty new cover that you have just seen. May it serve for many issues to come! This term we have a good balance between styles of content, from academic articles to poetry, via the Society’s usual detour to the realm of the extremely silly. (There is, of course, a degree of overlap between these.) But don’t take me at my word. Look on, and maybe even thou shalt find it. Farewell! With warmest regards, Daeron alias Samuel M. Karlin, Editor of Anor Issue 51 of Anor, Easter Term, 2017 Page 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS “Farewell, friend…” 4 by Brigid Ehrmantraut The Flame Imponderable 19 by Samuel Cook Onomastic Monarchical Idiosyncrasy 23 by Samuel Cook The Decalogue of Manwë 29 by Samuel Cook The Shibboleth of Igor 31 by Samuel Cook Thengels 35 by James Baillie Poetry from Eagle Debates 37 by various members of the Society Consequences 42 by various members of the Society Issue 51 of Anor, Easter Term, 2017 Page 3 “FAREWELL, FRIEND…” Mythic Divergence in J.R.R. Tolkien and Michael Moorcock’s Re-Characterisations of Kullervo Brigid Ehrmantraut “The great epics dignified death, but they did not ignore it, and it is one of the reasons why they are superior to the artificial romances, of which Lord of the Rings is merely one of the most recent” (126). So wrote prolific fantasy author Michael Moorcock in his notable 1987 critique of J.R.R. Tolkien’s work, “Epic Pooh,” where he rather bitingly reduced Middle-earth to the size and relevance of A.A. Milne’s Hundred Acre Wood. This is ironic as both authors turned to the same source material, the suicide of the tragic character Kullervo from the Finnish national epic, The Kalevala, in order to lend death an air of dignity in their subsequent fantasy epics, Tolkien’s Silmarillion (1977) and later Children of Húrin (2007) and Moorcock’s Elric of Melniboné series (1961-present). Moorcock’s critique largely applies to The Lord of the Rings, not The Silmarillion, though he does have some ire to spare for the latter. In “Epic Pooh” Moorcock claims one of mainstream modern fantasy’s chief faults is, “The humor is often unconscious because, like Tolkien, the authors take words seriously but without pleasure” and footnotes a specific example, “The Silmarillion (1977) is, of course, the finest proof of this argument” (122). Yet, when asked if Tolkien’s Túrin and his Elric share a source, in 2004 he stated on his blog, “…I haven't read, of course, …the Tolkien, though I believe he began The Silmarillion earlier than parts of Lord of the Rings, at least. I have to admit here, too, that I haven’t read large chunks of Lord of the Rings…” This presents two contradictory claims. Had Moorcock read any or all of The Silmarillion he would probably have realised that Tolkien drew from the same sources, thereby accomplishing just what Moorcock complained he should have: the creation of a greater sense of gravity surrounding the many deaths in his own epic tragedy. Ultimately, Tolkien and Moorcock both adapt Kullervo’s death scene, producing narratives where death is treated with seriousness and dignity, but diverge in their respective portrayals of their (anti)heroes’ motivations for suicide and the evolving autonomy allowed to their stories’ swords, thus developing two very different conceptualisations of fate. Issue 51 of Anor, Easter Term, 2017 Page 4 Kullervo’s original story is as bleak as it is striking. The darkest and most conflicted “hero” of Elias Lönnrot’s Kalevala, he begins life a slave after a family feud has gone awry. Following several unsuccessful attempts by his uncle Untamo, to kill him as a child, the boy is sold into slavery. Eventually, Kullervo uses black magic to turn the herd he is guarding into a pack of wolves and bears, which devour his captors, allowing him to escape. He reunites with his family but unknowingly seduces his long-lost sister, leading her to commit suicide by drowning. Kullervo then goes off to war, eager for vengeance against Untamo. He returns to find his surviving family members dead and wanders through the forest until he encounters the place where he defiled his sister, marked by barren earth where no vegetation will grow. After a brief conversation with his own sword during which the weapon decides that since it has shed plenty of innocent blood, it has no qualms about sheading its master’s as well, Kullervo falls upon the blade, killing himself. The tale ends with a moral dictum about the dangers of raising children poorly, effectively attributing Kullervo’s tragedy to his abusive upbringing. Kullervo’s development as a character was never particularly clear-cut and his convoluted genealogy in the tale itself is nothing compared to the complexity of his genesis as a composite character in Elias Lönnrot’s imagination. An ethnographer looking to create a sense of unified cultural heritage for Finland in the wake of the Romantic Nationalist movements sweeping Europe in the 19th century, Lönnrot spent years compiling the collection of oral legends that form his poetic work, which was published in its final form in 1849. Most of the tales that comprise the epic were collected in Karelia, an area covering the eastern part of Finland and the western edge of Russia and, like most components of European oral traditions, assimilated popular fairytales, older mythologies, distorted historical events, and later Christian doctrine. Keith Bosley asserts that, “Lönnrot virtually invented the Kullervo of cantos 31-36 by combining poems about an orphaned child of Herculean strength… a departing warrior… incest… and about reacting to news of death… the main characters of these poems have various names, including Kullervo” (xxxii). Interestingly enough, Kullervo was a relatively minor figure in the original 1835 edition of The Kalevala, confined to one canto of bloody vengeance. In Niina Hämäläinen’s words, it is only in the final 1849 version of the work that, “The Kullervo poem became a miniature epic in itself… amounting to six poems tracing the eventful life of the leading character from birth to death” (367). The character’s evolution hardly stopped mid-19th century, however, as modern fantasy writers continued to adapt the already ambiguous figure. Issue 51 of Anor, Easter Term, 2017 Page 5 Statements exist from both Tolkien and Moorcock mentioning The Kalevala as a specific influence on their works, though it seems neither writer read the other’s retelling of the legend. Tolkien wrote to W.H. Auden that, “the beginning of the legendarium, of which [The Lord of the Rings] is a part (the conclusion), was in an attempt to reorganize some of the Kalevala, especially the tale of Kullervo the hapless, in a form of my own.” Indeed, Tolkien produced a youthful attempt at translating and expanding the Kullervo section of The Kalevala in 1914 (“The Story of Kullervo”). This “germ of The Silmarillion” as he described it to his son, Christopher, eventually found a home in his tale of Túrin Turambar, the First Age hero cursed with an evil fate and bearing an equally cursed sword. Doomed by the original Dark Lord of Middle Earth, Túrin loses his family, slays the dragon Gaurung, and accidentally marries Niënor, his own sister. She casts herself into a river after learning the true nature of their relationship and he takes his own life, following a brief conversation with his “black blade” (Children 256). Tolkien solidifies the connection to Finnish myth by calling Túrin, “a figure who might be said… to be derived from elements in Sigurd the Volsung, Oedipus, and the Finnish Kullervo” (Letters 150). Michael Moorcock’s Elric series, which first appeared in print in 1961, though the occasional story is still being written non-linearly, also displays conscious Kalevala influence. On his blog, Moorcock states, “the Kalevala was read to us at my boarding school when I was about seven.” The doomed albino emperor Elric of Melniboné is an avatar of Moorcock’s genre-defying Eternal Champion, a hero (or antihero as the case may be) condemned to eternal reincarnation through endless cycles of the Multiverse, Moorcock’s series of parallel worlds. The greyest and probably best known of Moorcock’s major creations, Elric is dependent on his soul-devouring sword, Stormbringer, for physical vitality. He fails to save his lover and cousin Cymoril from her scheming brother and destroys his own civilisation before finally being called upon to perform his destiny as Eternal Champion and end the universe. Elric kills his wife and then best friend in order to gain the strength to usher in a new cycle of reality before Stormbringer dispatches him and flies away as the last vestige of Chaos in an orderly world, calling back a mocking retort.